


when a good man goes to war

by Anonymous



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Aziraphale Being an Asshole (Good Omens), Aziraphale is Not Nice, BAMF Aziraphale (Good Omens), Gen, Hacker!Crowley, Hurt Crowley, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Rescue, references to non-con
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-05-12 21:38:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19237600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Less than two years after their face swapping trick, Crowley goes missing.Aziraphale would go through Hell to get him back, and if he has to steal code from the NSA to do it, he will.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:**  
>  \- Reference to possible off-screen non-con (no actual non-con depicted, whether it happened can be read either way).  
> \- Violence is brutal, but mostly implied/off screen.  
> \- Permanent death by holy water of demons (not Crowley). On a related note, Aziraphale is seriously not nice in this fic.
> 
> Wasn't sure whether these merited Archive Warnings.

After the fifth message he left on Crowley's voicemail over the past twelve hours, Aziraphale decided to go look for his demon in person. It was intrusive, of course it was, to break into his friend's flat, but he was worried. He had the right to be--it had been less than two years since he had experienced first hand the hatred that Crowley's former colleagues harboured for him as he was escorted through Hell. Besides, Aziraphale wouldn't put it past his own former colleagues to do something to Crowley just to get to him, either.

 

He considered taking a cab to Crowley's place, but chose to use the phone lines, instead. Crowley had made him sit through enough crime shows over the past year, that he knew that in a missing person situation, the first twenty-four hours were essential. He did not see how a missing demon situation would be any different.

 

"Don't think that," Aziraphale told himself before picking up the phone to travel through it. "He's not missing. Perhaps he just went out for a walk... without his phone... for twelve hours. Maybe a walk through a tunnel without reception or something? A really long tunnel? He likes tunnels, right?."

 

"... Or maybe he's asleep. He could be asleep. He has been known to sleep for decades at a time." Aziraphale liked to think that Crowley was enjoying this century enough not to decide to sleep through it, but it wasn't an impossibility.

 

When he got to Crowley's place, the last bit of hope Aziraphale was desperately clinging to died. The flat was a mess. The statues had toppled over, and even Crowley's plants were strewn all over the floor, with leaves and soil scattered everywhere. 

 

"No," Aziraphale breathed. "No, no, no." 

 

There was simply no way Crowley would have voluntarily left his plants in such a state. As much as Crowley berated, threatened, and bullied them, Aziraphale knew that he loved his plants. Of course he knew, how could he not? He was an angel. He could _sense_ love. 

 

They had gotten to him. He didn't know if it was Above or Below or something else entirely, but they had gotten to Crowley. In a burst of righteous fury, Aziraphale was ready to storm the gates of Heaven and Hell single handedly, but he forced himself to look at the situation reasonably before he did something rash. 

 

There was no holy water around. Aziraphale would have been able to feel its presence. Thus, whoever had taken Crowley had taken him alive. It was possible that he was still alive, and Aziraphale would be doing him no favours by going on a suicide mission.

 

He decided that the first order of business would be to gather information. He found his way to the building security office and looked through the tapes. Under normal circumstances, he would have gently talked the security guard into letting him see the tapes, but these were no normal circumstances, so he snapped his fingers and miracled himself access. 

 

It took him no time at all to find footage of Hastur, Vanx, and another demon Aziraphale did not recognise entering the building with an empty suitcase, and leaving it with a much heavier suitcase. They loaded the suitcase into the trunk of a car driven by a fourth demon and Aziraphale lost track of them there.

 

He did not have time to feel anger at these demons putting his Crowley in a suitcase and hauling him around like so much junk. He did not have time for it, so he didn't, suppressing those feelings for later. For now, he still needed information.

 

He considered finding traffic footage and tracking them further, but the footage he had found was from fourteen hours prior. They had almost certainly already left the earth. He knew that Hell was a huge place, the residence of millions of demons and billions of souls, and there was no footage to sift through.

 

... Or was there? 

 

He remembered that Crowley had mentioned that mass surveillance was a human invention, but that it had been well appreciated and even emulated Below. Was it possible that they had really implemented it there? If they had, there was no way Crowley would have not got himself at least some level of access to it; after all, hacking had been one of his favourite pass-times. Another had been sticking it to authorities, Above, Below and everywhere in between.

 

Nothing for it, Aziraphale would have to go through Crowley's computer. He found the computer in the study, and brought it out of hibernation, or "brumation" as Crowley insisted on calling it, because no possession of Crowley's would go through _hibernation_ , seriously, have some respect. (Aziraphale once tried to argue that the state the computer was in objectively resembled hibernation more than it did brumation. He did not try twice.)

 

He was prompted for a password. Aziraphale generally had a respect for privacy, so even though Crowley had never been careful about typing his password in front of him, Aziraphale had never looked.

 

He regretted it now.

 

_Bentley_ , he tried.

 

It did not work. That would have been too easy. 

 

He knew that many people chose passwords based on meaningful dates, like the birthday of a loved one, or an anniversery. He tried variations on September 19, 1926, the date that Crowley had acquired his beloved car, but those did not work either.

 

He tried the day that Crowley tempted Eve, which was the day before Aziraphale had met him. He tried the day Crowley had invented the selfie. He tried to think back to when Crowley had acquired his favourite plants, but the dates he could remember didn't work either.

 

Since he was running out of guesses, he decided to give up and try the security questions. He was fairly sure he knew Crowley better than anyone else did. He might know the answers to those. 

 

_What was the item you gave Adam and co? (Two words)_

 

Aziraphale frowned at the first question, thinking back to the Apocalypse-That-Wasn't. Crowley had not given Adam and his friends anything. Perhaps a break in time and a pep talk before Satan showed up, but that could hardly count as an item.

 

Or perhaps he didn't mean Adam and his friends, but rather a different Adam and a different co, Adam and Eve, from all those millenia ago... But Crowley hadn't given _that_ Adam anything either. The temptation to eat the apple, and encouragement towards curiosity, didn't count as an item, and even if it did, he had given it to Eve, not Adam. 

 

And then it occured to Aziraphale, and when it did, somewhere, deep inside, he knew that he was right.

 

_Flaming sword_ he wrote. 

 

The answer was accepted. 

 

"Oh, Crowley," Aziraphale said out loud, as he worked through the rest of the security questions.

 

Every one of the fifteen security questions was geared towards Aziraphale. Many of them were things only the two of them would know. Crowley had written Aziraphale a back door into his own personal computer.

 

The last question read: _Really, my angel? You never looked at my password in the past few months? Of course, you didn't, you angel, you. Still. A right shame you didn't manage to guess it. Press enter to enter._

 

Aziraphale filed that away to think about later, when he had time. Instead of thinking about it, he changed the password when the computer prompted him to. He had more pressing matters to attend to than figuring out what Crowley's password had been.

 

Crowley's filesystem had a labyrinthine and otherworldy organisational structure which would have been incomprehensible to humans and other mortals. Luckily, while Aziraphale was on the side of the mortals, he was not one of them. In fact, the filesystem was organised in a near-perfect reproduction of the organisational structure of his own bookshop. Another thought to file away for later.

 

It took him very little time to find that Hell had, in fact, replicated earth's surveillance system, and written it into the aether itself.

 

And Crowley did indeed have a backdoor into it, with access to all the surveillance feeds in all of the realms Below, at least for the previous twenty-four hours.

 

Now, to locate him, assuming he was Below, Aziraphale merely needed to sift through 700 million surveillance feeds. He sighed. He was going to have to get some help.

 

He knew just the person to ask.

 

 

*********************************************  
*********************************************  
*********************************************

 

 

The thing about Newton Pulsifer was that he was actually an excellent programmer, in theory. He could pass paper-and-pencil computer science exams and white board programming tests with flying colours. He had the passion, and, at least when it came to theory, he had the gift as well. It's just that his passion and his gift were paired with an otherworldly ineptitude when it came to the practice. 

 

This latter ineptitude, of course, was what led to his his being out of a job at the moment, which also led to his being the perfect person to hire to teach Aziraphale how to write facial recognition software.

 

Newt accepted the job with grace, and was more than willing to start immediately, coming over to Crowley's flat and agreeing to Aziraphale's instruction not to go near Crowley's computer.

 

Unfortunately, the project only got rocky from there.

 

Aziraphale was a quick study, had always been one, but he was never well versed when it came to newfangled technology, and three hours later, he was still trying to wrap his head around CNNs, RNNs, feedforward and backprop, and he just knew that he had to come up with a different strategy if he wanted to locate Crowley within the year.

 

"Any chance someone has already written the algorithm I want?" Aziraphale asked.

 

"Oh yes, of course," Newt said. "You could use ResNet, which is open to public use. There's also a few of its variants, like DenseNet and ResNeXt. They're powerful and you can make them fairly accurate. ResNet has been pre-trained on a wide range of data. Though it won't be very fast at processing through this much."

 

"Are there any that would be able to process through all the video feeds in real time?"

 

"Well, that... not that I know of. Not open source, anyway."

 

"Open source? What does that mean?"

 

"Means public, so anyone can use it."

 

"Hm. And what about _closed_ source?"

 

"Well, probably the state of the art can do what you want. I'm almost sure China has something like that. Probably the United States, too. Maybe some of the more serious players in the corporate world: Google, Facebook."

 

"But you think China would probably have the best? Who in China, exactly?"

 

"Oh, that sort of thing would probably be under the purview of the 3PLA. That's China's equivalent of GCHQ. But they're not going to share it with us."

 

"Not voluntarily, no, I'd imagine not."

 

"Oh... Oh! Well if we're going in that direction, you should know that China's state facial recognition networks are pre-trained almost entirely on Asian faces, mostly East Asian, maybe also some Turkic. The NSA would probably be the best for your purposes."

 

"The NSA," Aziraphale repeated. "Hm. Do you think you could, I don't know, improve the NSA's security? Assuming I can get us into the facilities." 

 

"Oh yes, definitely. They recently switched away from using Suite B elliptic curve cryptography to proctect themselves from quantum computing based attacks, but they didn't account for..."

 

"How would you feel about a trip to Washington DC?" Aziraphale had already zoned out a few words into Newt's explanation, and did not feel too bad about cutting him off.

 

"I can look for flights," Newt said eagerly, moving towards Crowley's computer, which had gone back into brumation.

 

Aziraphale stopped him, gently but firmly, holding him back with an arm.

 

"Oh, right, sorry," Newt said, remembering their agreement: No touching Crowley's computer.

 

"It's quite alright. It won't be necessary, anyway."

 

Aziraphale looked up the phone number of a company with an office a couple blocks away from the NSA headquarters, dialled the number on his phone, and held a hand out to Newt. "Hold hold onto me."

 

With that, he placed the call and brought them both across the ocean. 

 

"Cool," Newt said, when he came out the other end, while Aziraphale put the receptionist who had picked up the phone to sleep in a pleasant nap, which she looked like she desparately needed.

 

"Really?" Aziraphale smiled at Newt. "Most mortals would have more to say than that."

 

"I mean, it _was_ cool. I can't say it's the amazing or the most surprising thing I've experienced in the past two years," Newt smiled to himself.

 

"Well, I suppose that's fair enough. You have, after all, seen Armageddon averted."

 

"Oh, well. That too. That's not quite what I meant."

 

"Oh?" Aziraphale said.

 

Then he looked more carefully at Newt, with both his eyes and his inner sight.

 

"Oh." Of course, the love. The boy was thinking about meeting Anathema. Their sweet, young love was so precious and so human. "Yes, of course. I am very happy for you both." 

 

"Thank you," Newt said. "So, the NSA?" 

 

 

***************

 

The NSA was no match for an angel who was no longer having his every miracle counted and checked for frivolity Upstairs, and a software engineer with Newt's _unique_ skillset.

 

***************

 

When he and Newt were back in Crowley's flat, working to interface the stolen code, Aziraphale wondered briefly what Crowley would think of him infiltrating the NSA to steal their technology. He would be proud, no doubt. Aziraphale could just see that smug smile in his mind. The dastardly demon. Aziraphale didn't know why he tolerated him.

 

When the code started working and they got video on Crowley, all such thoughts ground to a halt.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the posting issues. Also a note about (phone-free) teleportation: Neither Aziraphale nor Crowley could teleport into Tadfield Air Base, but Aziraphale could teleport the soldier away. My interpretation is that angels can only teleport someone to the place where they feel the safest and/or most loved. Other than that, they have to use the phones.
> 
> (Demons, on the other hand, can only teleport someone to a place where they feel particularly _unsafe and unloved_. This is why Couldn't couldn't just teleport to Aziraphale's bookshop when Hastur was chasing him.)

"Good God," Newt breathed, looking over Aziraphale's shoulder.

 

His words pulled Aziraphale out of his own shock. 

 

"Yes, right," Aziraphale said, not quite able to tear his eyes away from the horror on the screen. "Thank you for the help. Would you prefer cash or checque?" 

 

"Wait, what? I'm not just going to _leave_ now. He's getting tortured!" 

 

Aziraphale stopped the video feed and put the computer into brumation.

 

"Yes," Aziraphale said. "I could see that."

 

"Well, aren't we going to rescue him?" 

 

Aziraphale gave him a sharp look. "No. _We_ are not. _I_ am going to rescue him. You're going to collect your pay and go home. Anathema probably expected you back a while ago." 

 

"What? You can't expect me to just leave now! I mean, we were never close, but I know him, too! We saved the world together. Sort of." 

 

Aziraphale sighed. "I know that it's not in your nature to leave in this kind of situation, but this is not a walk through the NSA! This is literal Hell we're talking about."

 

"I know that! I'm--"

 

" _I can't protect you Down There_. Even an Arch-angel would not be able to teleport unassisted down there, and I am a mere Principality. The kind of teleportation we do through the phones wouldn't work, either, because there's no signal. And if I use even a hint of my magic there, we will be detected and caught immediately. They watch out for Heavenly magic Downstairs. It's the thing they watch for _the most_."

 

It looked like Newt was about to argue, but Aziraphale cut him off. 

 

"Anyway, I can also do bank transfer. That would probably be easiest actually."

 

He snapped his fingers. "There, done." 

 

"But--"

 

"I'm sorry, but I don't have time to continue this conversation. I need to plan a rescue."

 

"But you can't--"

 

Aziraphale did not wait for the rest of his sentence. He snapped his fingers, clearing Newt's memories of the worst that he had seen, although he left most of it intact; the boy had gone through enough and he didn't need Aziraphale messing with his head too much.

 

"What?" Newt asked, confused.

 

Aziraphale snapped his fingers again, sending Newt to wherever he felt the safest and the most loved.

 

Newt disappeared. Aziraphale felt a twinge of guilt for using a miracle to end the argument, but he did not have the patience to argue, and there was simply no way he was going to bring a _human_ into Hell. Newt was so young and so brave that even though Aziraphale knew he wasn't entirely harmless, he couldn't help but be reminded of a newborn calf who has not yet learned to fear the tiger. 

 

Aziraphale pulled the video of Crowley back onto the screen. Crowley was now alone in the cell, shivering and chained to the wall under what appeared to be a leaking pipe that occasionally dripped water onto him. Not holy water, thankfully, but the irregular dripping was clearly designed to drive him insane. Still, this was a significant improvement from the situation when Aziraphale last tore his eyes away from the screen. 

 

Aziraphale tamped down on the rage that was rising inside him at the thought of his demon being treated like this. He did not need the rage right then; Crowley may have done some of his best work when he was angry, but Aziraphale did not. Crowley did not need him to be angry. He needed him to be at his best.

 

Aziraphale briefly considered turning the feed off to focus on the planning, but he knew it would not work. He would know that it was happening; not seeing it would not help him concentrate, it would only cause him to imagine even worse things. 

 

He also pulled up older footage, from the previous twenty-four hours, and rewrote the code to save all the footage that contained Crowley, and anyone who interacted with him, to memory. 

 

He found that they had dragged Crowley to hell seventeen hours prior. He decided to watch all of the footage that contained his friend at the fastest setting an angel could process video, which was, helpfully, one of the default play-back settings on Crowley's video player. 

 

Two seconds in, he turned his internal functions off, in an attempt to quell the horror roiling his stomache and the rage heating up his chest. It did not work, but Aziraphale forced himself to continue watching. Partly this was because he needed to know everything he could about the situation if there would be any hope of rescuing him.

 

But partly also, Aziraphale knew that he deserved this.

 

It was his fault, in several ways, that this was happening. Crowley was clever, cleverer than all the other demons in Hell. If he had never met Aziraphale, well. Aziraphale had become soft because of Crowley, that much he knew, but he had long suspected that the reverse was also true. If Crowley had never met Aziraphale, would he be in Hell's bad books at all?

 

More recently, he had clearly also failed Crowley on his last trip to Hell: if he had been more emphatic, more frightening, would the demons have come after his friend again?

 

Directly or indirectly, Aziraphale had had a hand in doing this to Crowley. Having to watch what happened was the least of what he deserved. 

 

***************

 

Walking into Hell wasn't as simple as wearing a demon's face, just like walking into Heaven wasn't as simple as wearing an angel's. There was older magic at work. A simple face swap could not fool that. To go into Hell, you had to have a genuine spark of darkness within you, an impurity of purpose, and to go into Heaven, a genuine spark of goodness, a purity of purpose.

 

When Crowley had entered Heaven wearing Aziraphale's face, he had focused on his desire to protect and save his best friend. When Aziraphale had entered hell wearing Crowley's face, he had done it with a real desire to deceive and to inspire fear in the hearts of his enemies. 

 

He had had to practise, back then, clearing his more innate feelings of love and focusing on the desire to deceive and to terrify.

 

This time, as he watched the footage, Aziraphale realised he would not need to practice it at all.

 

Aziraphale's lip twisted as he watched how the demons vied for the privilege of torturing Crowley. Many of the demons hated his friend, but only the dukes of Hell and those of higher rank seemed to get the privilege of actually doing anything about it, and not even all of them did. He watched the smug smile on Hastur's face while the demon walked Crowley from one cell to another for further torture. Hastur basked in the raw envy on the face of the other demons.

 

Aziraphale formed an idea.


	3. Chapter 3

[Forty-six days later]

 

"You!" Hastur spat, as he struggled in the power-dampening manacles and the bindings Aziraphale had tied him down with, in a cage in the corner of the basement of Aziraphale's bookshop.

 

"Yes, me," Aziraphale agreed. 

 

He checked the restraints.

 

Crowley, of course, knew how to break out of the manacles with nothing but a piece of wire like you could get from a wire clothes-hanger. He had a file saved on his computer detailing his research. Aziraphale was fairly certain Hastur did not have this particular skillset, but, just in case, he secured the demon with Heavenly magic and a few earthly bindings and sigils he had picked up from the witches he had met over the years.

 

"What are you doing?! What did you do to me? You are going to pay for this!" Hastur yelled.

 

"Probably," Aziraphale agreed, ignoring the demon's other questions.

 

"What's this about? Is this for your boyfriend? What do you think you're going to get some kind of prisoner exchange?" 

 

Aziraphale shrugged.

 

Hastur laughed. "That's never going to work. They'll get you. They'll _burn_ you. Probably do it in front of him, too."

 

"I suppose we'll see," Aziraphale said.

 

"Just imagine the look on his face when they bring you in to--"

 

Hastur was cut off when Aziraphale put him to sleep.

 

Aziraphale had spent forty-six days preparing for this moment; he was not going to waste an extra minute entertaining the demon. He had work to do.

 

************

 

It had taken forty-six days to prepare his plan. He had spent that time observing Hastur and the partners he worked with top-side, learning his habits and mannerisms, building the cage to hold a demon, setting up cell phone signal boosters near the gates of hell, and, finally tampering with Hastur and Vanx's assignment and leading them into his trap.

 

(He had killed Vanx. It was unceremonious, and he wondered if he should have felt something more about the first true death at his hand, but he did not dwell on it. He did not have time for introspection.)

 

Forty-six days he had spent watching Crowley, listening to his screams, and watching him shiver and grow weaker between rounds of torture.

 

************

 

[Ninth day after Crowley was kidnapped]

 

"How's the bookshop?" Crowley asked, slightly hoarsely, but otherwise casually, on the ninth day, in one of the moments that he was left alone, chained to the wall. His captors occasionally left him alone for a few hours so that he could recover the ability to scream. 

 

Aziraphale jumped and looked around his bookshop, where he had set up base.

 

"Crowley?" Aziraphale said, though nobody was there with him.

 

"Aww, did you missssss?" Crowley frowned at the sibilant phoneme. "Misssss. Ugh... Have you been thinking about me?"

 

Aziraphale stared at the screen.

 

"Ah, you know," Crowley said as though Aziraphale had responded. "Making trouble here and there."

 

Aziraphale's heart wrenched at the casual tone Crowley was affecting.

 

"Aww. Were you worried about me?" 

 

"Of course I'm worried," Aziraphale said to the screen. 

 

"I'm fine. I've been fine. Don't worry your pretty head, my angel."

 

"I'm allowed to worry," Aziraphale responded. "I will get you out of here. I will!"

 

Crowley paused again.

 

"Oh, you know how it goes, got in a bit of trouble downstairs, no big deal," Crowley said, after the pause.

 

Crowley continued his side of this conversation for a few more minutes. Aziraphale was torn about whether to continue listening in. On the one hand, it seemed to be a private conversation. On the other hand, Aziraphale was clearly one of the parties in this private conversation, even if it was happening inside the demon's head.

 

In the end, he chose to listen, occasionally swearing to the Crowley on the screen that he was coming, even though he knew the latter couldn't hear him.

 

***

 

[Eleventh day after Crowley was kidnapped]

 

Eleven days into his plan, Aziraphale had hacked into Hell's communication system, with some help from Newt. It had taken some work--while the boy was confident in his own ability to improve the security system of the NSA, Aziraphale had to show him his way around the aether in order to convince him to try the same with Hell's system. He had then sent Newt home again, well compensated and more than a little confused about what had happened. 

 

Aziraphale had also put in the order for some top-of-the-line mobile signal boosters. The boosters wouldn't work in Hell if they were touched by Heavenly magic, so he had to wait for them to arrive the slow way, by the human postal system.

 

It was shortly after he put in the order that Crowley spoke again.

 

"You know, they wanted to make me regret what I did," Crowley said, with the same casual tone, though it seemed more forced.

 

"I'd imagine," Aziraphale said, even though Crowley couldn't hear him.

 

"I mean, I don't," Crowley continued. "Not any of it."

 

"I know," Aziraphale said, "It's one of the things I love about you." He lowered his voice and rephrased it. "It's one of the reasons I love you."

 

He never would have phrased it like that to Crowley's face, of course, but what did that matter? Crowley wasn't there.

 

"I am a bit sssorry, though," Crowley continued. "About what I did to you. Getting in your way for all those millenia."

 

"Surely you're not sorry for _that_ ," Aziraphale huffed at the screen.

 

"You know, the Arrangement," Crowley added.

 

"What?" Aziraphale's heart stopped in his chest.

 

"No, not the Arrangement, I'll never regret that. But, well, the trouble it caused you. If it weren't for me, you wouldn't have been hated by all those other Angels." 

 

"... Excuse me?!"

 

"I always took care not to make you Fall, but it never occurred to me that I might make you a pariah in Heaven."

 

"That's not on you," Aziraphale said. "That's on those closed-minded self-righteous arch-angels. And even if one of us is to blame, I _chose_ earth. I _chose_ you!"

 

"The way that git Gabriel looked at you. I wanted to doussse him in Hellfire. But even I have to admit that, at least on some level, I _am_ at fault for their attitude." 

 

"This is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard!"

 

"Yesss, angel" Crowley said. "I know you forgive me, you always do."

 

"That's _not_ what I said!" 

 

"But I don't know if I can forgive myssself."

 

Aziraphale yelled uselessly at the screen.

 

***

 

[Twenty-third day after Crowley was kidnapped]

 

As the days went by, Crowley spoke less and less.

 

Aziraphale spent the twenty-third day of his plan down in various tunnels and underground metro stations testing the attentuation of the mobile signals. He had also experimented near the entrance of Hell to check for the effect of its magic on the signal. (He had had to order several sets to check which ones played the best with depth and demonic magic, because the first set he ordered did not do well at all.)

 

He got home satisfied with the latest batch of mobile boosters and feeling optimistic for the first time in several weeks.

 

As soon as he got home, he went over the footage he had missed, as was his routine these days. He had long since stopped using his corporation's heart, but somehow it wrenched anyway. Crowley in one of the worst states he had ever seen him. He had passed out continually that day, and the demons had revived him with Lord knows what. 

 

After the demons were finally one, Crowley spoke again. He no longer made the effort to sound casual or conversational. His voice was too weak to make it realistic, anyway.

 

"You know... I worried at firssssst that you'd... try to resssssscue me... down here."

 

"Of course I'm coming to rescue you. Hang in there," Aziraphale said.

 

"Of coursssssse, even you wouldn't be that ssssstupid... Though you could be sssstupid... sssometimes... ssso, ssso ssstupid."

 

"How about you tell me that to my face, when you're back on earth?"

 

"The reason... I know that... that you haven't tried already is that they'd have shown me the footage... they'd have... you know... It would..." He trailed off.

 

"It won't happen," Aziraphale said. "When I go in there, I'm going to get both of us out alive. Can't say the same for your brethren, though."

 

***

 

The next day, Aziraphale noticed Hastur, Dagon, and Vanx trying to cook up a plan to kidnap him. They argued about it, though, all of them too frightened to actually try it. All they knew about him was that he was an angel who was immune to Hellfire, and ultimately they decided not to try their luck.

 

***

 

[Twenty-sixth day after Crowley was kidnapped]

 

Aziraphale watched the proceedings closely. Hastur, Vanx, and Dagon were all in the cell with Crowley, which was not a good sign.

 

"We've got something for you today," Hastur said. "This is going to be fun."

 

Dagon pulled out an old laptop computer and loaded up a video.

 

Crowley did not even bother to raise his head. Vanx pushed his head up towards the video. The video opened.

 

In it was a figure facing away from the camera dressed in a replica of Aziraphale's suit. The figure had its hands tied behind its back.

 

Crowley's eyes widened. "No..."

 

"What?" Aziraphale breathed. "That's not me. That's obviously not me!"

 

The figure tied up on the screen wasn't an angel--it didn't even look alive. It looked more like a mannequin that had been miracled to look like a person.

 

Crowley, however, was either delirious or Vanx was glamoring him somehow, because he was not seeing the obvious ruse.

 

"No, no you can't!" Crowley cried.

 

Hastur laughed. "Can't we though?"

 

Hastur entered the scene on the screen.

 

"No," Crowley's eyes were glued to the screen and Vanx was still holding his head.

 

The Hastur on the screen lit the Aziraphale-mannequin up in a tornado of fire.

 

Crowley screamed. 

 

***

 

After that, Crowley stopped speaking when he was alone. He stopped doing anything, not even responding to what was done to him, except for the most basic reflexes. 

 

***************

 

 

For forty-six days, Aziraphale had planned and watched and occasionally shouted at his screen.

 

Right now, with Hastur unconscious in his cage, he was finally going to be able to rescue his demon.


End file.
